Usenet problems?

Is anyone here having problems with Usenet today?

I am using Astraweb and today it's incredibly slow and sometimes times out completely. It's going from 0 to 10 kB/sec.
I have tried reconnecting, rebooting the router, restarting the PC, disabling firewall/AV and changing usenet clients.

I have asked other Astraweb users and they are having no problems and downloading at full speed, so I am wondering if it's a problem with Plusnet's traffic management or something.
I am on Option 3.

Any idea why this is happening?

Plusnet is working fine for me,could be a 'local issue.

Which news server are you using?

Everything else is fine, it's only Usenet. Browsing is very quick but I noticed Usenet provider websites are all running very slow.

www.giganews.com
www.astraweb.com

Those websites are taking me 20 seconds to load... I just ran a tracert to the Astraweb EU servers and got this result;

Tracing route to eu.news.astraweb.com [193.202.122.136]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 19 ms 14 ms 16 ms lo0-plusnet.pte-ag2.plus.net [195.166.128.72]
3 186 ms 206 ms 214 ms ge0-0-0-504.pte-gw2.plus.net [84.92.4.90]
4 15 ms 15 ms 15 ms 80.239.193.141
5 14 ms 15 ms 14 ms ldn-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.248.90]
6 19 ms 16 ms 33 ms ldn-b4-link.telia.net [80.91.249.130]
7 15 ms 19 ms 13 ms ge-6-22.car2.London1.Level3.net [4.68.111.181]
8 19 ms 16 ms 40 ms ae-32-52.ebr2.London1.Level3.net [4.69.139.126]

9 23 ms 24 ms 30 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.132.134]

10 36 ms 24 ms 23 ms ae-2-52.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.139.17
0]
11 23 ms 28 ms 25 ms REVELATION.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [212.72.4
0.70]
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 3450 ms * * unknown.ams.astraweb.com [193.202.122.136]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 3205 ms 2592 ms 2959 ms unknown.ams.astraweb.com [193.202.122.136]

Trace complete.

I get this

Tracing route to eu.news.astraweb.com [193.202.122.107]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 24 ms 25 ms 25 ms lo0.plusnet.thn-ag1.plus.net [195.166.128.101]
3 25 ms 19 ms 20 ms vl703.thn-gw2.plus.net [84.92.4.242]
4 22 ms 22 ms 20 ms ldn-b4-link.telia.net [213.248.84.197]
5 22 ms 22 ms 21 ms ge-6-22.car2.London1.Level3.net [4.68.111.181]
6 22 ms 25 ms 26 ms ae-32-52.ebr2.London1.Level3.net [4.69.139.126]

7 30 ms 28 ms 29 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.132.134]

8 64 ms 64 ms 61 ms ae-2-52.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.139.17
0]
9 64 ms 68 ms 69 ms REVELATION.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [212.72.4
0.70]
10 1410 ms 715 ms 334 ms unknown.ams.astraweb.com [193.202.122.107]

Trace complete.
haven't used usenet today so can't help I'm afraid the web sites are slow loading though

Edited by deleted (Mon 23-Mar-09 23:24:42)

As soon as it hit mid night all the problems were fixed so I think it might have been throttling.
Those web pages now load in less than a second and I am downloading at my full line speed of 830 kB/sec...

The tracert looks better too;

Tracing route to eu.news.astraweb.com [193.202.122.134]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 15 ms 14 ms 14 ms lo0-plusnet.pte-ag2.plus.net [195.166.128.72]
3 16 ms 14 ms 13 ms ge0-0-0-504.pte-gw2.plus.net [84.92.4.90]
4 13 ms 14 ms 13 ms 80.239.193.141
5 13 ms 13 ms 14 ms ldn-bb2-link.telia.net [80.91.248.94]
6 13 ms 13 ms 14 ms ldn-b4-link.telia.net [80.91.251.13]
7 14 ms 14 ms 13 ms ge-6-22.car2.London1.Level3.net [4.68.111.181]
8 17 ms 18 ms 18 ms ae-32-52.ebr2.London1.Level3.net [4.69.139.126]

9 28 ms 24 ms 24 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.132.134]

10 24 ms 23 ms 22 ms ae-2-52.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.139.17
0]
11 22 ms 21 ms 23 ms REVELATION.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [212.72.4
0.70]
12 21 ms 22 ms 23 ms unknown.ams.astraweb.com [193.202.122.134]

Trace complete.

Edited by deleted (Tue 24-Mar-09 00:48:22)

Most probably was throttling then, I know miine is throttled in the afternoons and evenings there is a graph with throttling on Plusnet, if your are on one of the legace products (BBYW) just type this in the search box and it'll give you the throttling times

I am on Option 3 so it should have been downloading at atleast 30 kB/sec but sometimes it was completely blocked and I couldn't download at all.

Anyway, it's back to normal today and currently downloading full line speed.

I'm on option 3 as well, I have noticed that there is sometimes a lag before it gets up to full speed, if I start a download at midnight sometimes the speed doens;t increase till 30 minutes later, have you checked the plusnet site there might have been a problem

Another thought did you check your billed usage, is it possible your billing date is today and you had gone over your quota

@Zildjian285, I know a couple of the gateways are pretty busy at the moment during peak. Not sure which ones off the top of my head although you might want to try a reboot of your router to get on a different one.

In reply to a post by bpullen:

@Zildjian285, I know a couple of the gateways are pretty busy at the moment during peak. Not sure which ones off the top of my head...

Exactly my thoughts, packet loss. Once the allocated bandwidth for the traffic type is reached,ie Usenet, packets will be dropped, introducing artificial latency and therefore slowing down the connection in addition to rate limiting.

I notice some of the gateways running at over 11% packet loss, a huge difference from when rate limiting was introduced and it was averaging 1% for non-interactive traffic.

A sign that traffic is generally increasing, or that the Ellacoya is being tweaked, yet again, to preserve latency for higher priority traffic.
Hence, why I will not sign an 18 month [!] contract, there is no guarantee that the Ellacoya is not constantly tweaked to reduce bandwidth for lower priority traffic.

In reply to a post by tobykim:

I'm on option 3 as well, I have noticed that there is sometimes a lag before it gets up to full speed, if I start a download at midnight sometimes the speed doens;t increase till 30 minutes later, have you checked the plusnet site there might have been a problem

I have noticed the delay but it was like it for about 4 hours until I gave up. Speeds were 0 - 10 kB/sec from about 4pm to 8pm when they should have been a lot more. It even completely stopped downloading a few times and was stuck at 0 kB/sec.

In reply to a post by tobykim:

Another thought did you check your billed usage, is it possible your billing date is today and you had gone over your quota

Yeah I did check, my billing date isn't until the 2nd and I am nowhere near my quota. It is fixed now anyway, it only seemed to be that day.

In reply to a post by bpullen:

@Zildjian285, I know a couple of the gateways are pretty busy at the moment during peak. Not sure which ones off the top of my head although you might want to try a reboot of your router to get on a different one.

I did try that and jumped to a different gateway but it made no difference. I don't think it was caused by packet loss because it stopped working completely a few times, I was unable to connect to Usenet at all. It's also weird how all the Usenet websites (Giganews, Easynews, Astraweb) were running incredibly slow and tracer routers were showing latency of 3000ms and timing out.

It's happening again. It was working fine earlier but now Usenet is completely blocked, can't download at all.
Both Astraweb and Giganews websites are also incredibly slow again.

The Giganews speedtest is running at an absolute crawl.

Can you please run the speedtest at the Giganews website and tell me if it's also slow for you?

http://www.giganews.com/performance.html

Choose the news-europe.giganews.com speedtest server.

10469 on Sky Max LLU.

171kbps on Option 2 whereas the speed test here gives 6186.40 Kbps.

3946 kbps on Pro. I previously found Option 2 would be throttled for that speedtest, although when raised through the Plusnet forums, an adjustment was made which removed the throttling, for a short time at least.

150kbps giga (done wirelessly) took an age for the page to load although it's a bad time to do it now as throttling is in place, option 3

BBYW throttling in case you haven't got it http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archi...

Just checked and Astraweb is page is loading fine as is Giga, any reason why you need to connect to giga using the eu server did the speed test on .com and speeds ok
Don't use giga myself but use Astra on secure server

Edited by deleted (Wed 25-Mar-09 23:15:03)

I think it is something to do with the throttling but it shouldn't be throttled to below dial-up speeds on Option 3 or in my case almost completely blocked and unusable.

According to the "expected speeds" page Usenet should be capped to 320Kbps between 6pm and 10pm (on Option 3) but I'm not even getting a 10th of that speed during that time, something isn't right. I will keep checking until I find out what is causing it because not being able to use Usenet at all between 6pm and 10pm is a bit of a pain.

Try a different server Astraweb have a few and I'm sure Giga do, there might be a problem with the euro servers

Hi, I have had the same problem for the last 3 nights now stuck on 30k dload speed, has anybody found a solution to this?

I have had problems for 3 or 4 days. Throttling is occuring at all times of the day. I raised a ticket early yesterday:-

I am on BBYW Option 3 - my expected downstream speeds should, I believe, be as shown at http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archi...

Until very recently that is precisely what I got, result happiness.

Now Usenet (nntp) speeds have collapsed. During the day it is around 120 Kbps in the evening it is 56K modem speed and even at 06.50 it is only 720 Kbps. I do not believe it is congestion at the local exchange since if I do a speed test from e.g. Speedtest.net I invariably get close to my IP profile speed.

Can you please explain?

So far no response.

I used it yesterday morning and it was fine through Astraweb, what news servers are people using in case it's a server problem just tried it now and it's running at line speed 6.2Mbps

Edited by deleted (Wed 01-Apr-09 10:28:19)

30k still right now anyone else?

620 Kbps on Giganews

At 12.00 speed dropped to 200 Kbps - this is PlusNet 'traffic management'

Depends what product your on as to when throttling comes into effect if your on Unlimited it's pretty much across the board http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadb... previous expected speeds can be found by putting your product name into search box on main site

If you had taken the trouble to read my first post in this thread it would have told you precisely what product I am on together with a link to the restrictions to which I am subject. I believe that I should see no restriction until 16.00.

Newsgroup Download Speed Test @ 16.10

from news.giganews.com 90 Kbps
from europe-news.giganews.com 90 Kbps

Perhaps one of those nice people from PlusNet could try and persuade us that this is not caused by their actions whether deliberate or otherwise.

Extremely sorry just trying to help as you had put the details in a quote box I assumed that you were quoting a post by someone else, I consider myself chastised but can offer no further help

At 08.00 this morning Giganews speed test 220 Kbps. Was on gateway pc1-ng03 (at least that is what I have written down). Reconnected, now on ptn-ag2 and speed went to 1840 Kbps - close to my IP profile. Synch speed I hasten to add unchanged at 2432.

Sorry, did not mean to be churlish. Was in a bad mood since PN had not bothered to respond to my ticket and I was becoming increasingly frustrated.

There was a note on the plusnet forum about pn3 being slow last night, something about 30k on p2p.
I didn't have the problem but I was on a different central. (TG that they still have centrals no issues like I had with enta after the switch over, and a totally saturated Scottish node)

We've had a few reports of problems whilst connected to pcl-ag03. We're in the process of rebooting the Ellacoya switch that works alongside that gateway to see if it remedies the problem.

I'm still having Usenet problems. Right now I can't downloading anything - it takes a few minutes before it even connects and then it download at 0.06KB/s...
After a few minutes of it being connected it stops completely.

Tracerts are timing out to all the major news servers (Astraweb, Giganews, etc).

For some reason I can't copy the tracert from the command prompt (I tried ctrl + c) so here is a screenshot of a tracert to the Giganews european server;

http://i42.tinypic.com/2j4x0z5.jpg

I get pretty much the same result to the Astraweb and Easynews servers. I have disabled my antivirus and outside the throttling hours (after midnight up until 4pm) usenet downloads flawlessly at full speed.
I'm pretty sure it is something at Plusnet's end doing this.

I don't mind Usenet being throttled which is why I chose Option 3 because I don't use it much, but I don't like it being pretty much completely blocked and unusable!
If I can't get it fixed I will consider leaving unfortunately.

Edited by deleted (Thu 16-Apr-09 22:34:41)

For some reason I can't copy the tracert from the command prompt (I tried ctrl + c)

To do this:

Right click in command window and select Mark.
Highlight the text you want to copy.
Press enter on the keyboard.

Paste as normal into other apps or right click and select paste to paste back into the command window.